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Mountain Cake
1 C rich sour cream. 1 C sugar. 2 eggs. 1 t soda. 1/2 t cream of tartar 2 C flour 1/2 t lemon extract Pinch salt Mix sugar and cream together. Add beaten eggs and soda dissolved in little warm water. Add flour with cream of tartar and salt and then lemon extract. Beat well and bake one-half hour. Mrs. Robert H. Grummitt.
The ingredient list on this page has come down to us truncated — sugar, cream, eggs and soda are all called for in the method but never quantified. What follows is meant to help you read the recipe rather than to reconstruct the missing numbers, which cannot be recovered honestly from what survives.
- The missing quantitiesOnly flour (2 cups), cream of tartar (1/2 teaspoon), lemon extract (1/2 teaspoon) and a pinch of salt are given. Sugar, cream, eggs and soda appear in the instructions with no amounts at all, so the recipe as printed cannot be followed without guesswork.
- What "cream" meantUnqualified "cream" in a recipe of this kind means sweet dairy cream rather than a cultured one, and here it appears to take the place of the butter that would otherwise be creamed with the sugar. How rich that cream was is not recoverable from the page.
- Soda and cream of tartarTogether these are simply baking powder made in the bowl: cream of tartar is the acid, soda the base. The soda is dissolved in warm water so it disperses evenly, and the cream of tartar goes in dry with the flour so the two do not meet until the batter is mixed.
- Work quickly once mixedA tartrate leavening reacts as soon as it is wet and does not hold a second rise the way modern double-acting powder does. The batter should go into the pan and into the oven without standing about.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, which was normal when cooks judged a range by hand. A plain cake of this type belongs in a moderate oven, about 350F.
- Pan and timingNo tin is named either. Half an hour at moderate heat suits a single 8- or 9-inch layer or a shallow square pan; a deep loaf would need considerably longer. Judge by a clean tester rather than the clock.
- Lemon extractHalf a teaspoon against two cups of flour gives a light perfume rather than a pronounced lemon flavour.
Recipes of this kind were commonly gathered from cards and scraps handed in by contributors and set in type locally, and the missing line of the ingredient list here is the sort of loss such a process invites. "Mountain cake" is not a fixed formula in the way pound cake or sponge is; the name attaches to various plain white or layer cakes in American community collections, and is usually explained as describing the cake's height rather than any regional origin, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening, rather than a purchased baking powder, is the older method.